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Steve Simmons, QMI Agency

The highest paid front office in hockey history must determine quickly how it is that their hand-picked roster has failed so miserably in the most disappointing Maple Leaf season in memory.

This isn’t just the year that got away. For the more than $6 million that Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment doles out to its bloated management team — Brian Burke, Dave Nonis, Dave Poulin, Claude Loiselle, Rick Dudley, Cliff Fletcher — one a general manager, three former general managers, and two assistants — it has every reason to expect something resembling progress. The same way the fans, paying the freight of these overpaid and under-producing executives, have every reason to expect more than they have gotten in this diminishing season of Leaf collapse.

Burke ended last season by saying “from the all-star break on, we were fourth in the East.”

As recently as the firing of coach Ron Wilson he talked about “playing at a 100-point pace.”

But as Bill Parcells would often say, you are what the standings say you are. The Leafs are 24th in the NHL and slipping fast. This season of promise, opportunity and management misread has been left behind. Now the challenge is for the tall foreheads of the front office to determine how and where the Leafs go from here. But first, before anything else, they need to stop deluding themselves that this collection of overpaid talent is good enough to go forward with.

When last season ended Burke said without hesitation that “our No. 1 priority is a centre.” When he couldn’t come up with his No. 1 priority, he settled instead on the forever disappointing Tim Connolly.

He paid him just under $10 million to spend two years with the Leafs and when one of Connolly’s former bosses was critical of the signing — as were most people familiar with Connolly’s game — Burke called the critic and blasted him. On the phone, Burke was told: “I wish you called me before you signed him. I could have warned you.”

At last glance, Connolly was centring the Leafs’ third line before being moved to left wing to try and take the place of the injured Joffrey Lupul, which he is clearly incapable of doing.

The Connolly signing was not the reason the Leafs collapsed this year, but it is symptomatic of a consistent organizational misread the Leafs have found themselves in during the Burke years.

For all the supposed front office talent the Leafs have, they have misidentified and overpaid players time and time again, putting the overall structure in a salary capped league in difficulty.

The financial commitments to Connolly, to defenceman Mike Komisarek, to winger Colby Armstrong, to defencemen Luke Schenn and John Michael-Liles, and earlier to defenceman Francois Beaucheim — was a whopping $70.7 million in long term contracts. Almost all of it was misspent, although no one could have predicted Armstrong’s run of injuries which has rendered him marginal, and has put the Leafs in cap constraints going forward.

Komisarek was paid $22.5 million and has two years remaining.

Schenn, getting sixth defenceman minutes under both Ron Wilson and Randy Carlyle, is in the first year of a $14.6 million deal.

Liles played well in the first half, signed a new deal, and hasn’t matched it since: He has three years and $12.7 million to go.

Armstrong was a $9 million investment: He’s contributed nine goals to date.

And the Leafs also did Nashville a favour by taking on the final $7 million of Matthew Lombardi’s contract. Burke has the highest paid third liners in the game.

The number of contractual mistakes on the Leafs is troubling and astounding. And all this happened before playoff teams in Buffalo, Montreal and Tampa collapsed, before contending Washington grew disinterested, before teams below the Leafs a year ago, New Jersey, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Florida (13 points behind them) all skated by them.

They still don’t have the first line centre and one won’t be available in free agency. They still don’t have a first string goalie and don’t expect one available in free agency.

And what the high priced front office must determine is where the internal and external leadership comes from on this team. Why hasn’t someone stepped up and made a difference in this decline? Where, for all that money, is this team’s leadership? There is enough responsibility here to go around.

But it starts at the top. All this money doled out for that front office, for this roster, for 24th place and dropping.

Larry Tanenbaum, and the incoming duo of Nadir Mohamed and George Cope need to ask questions. They are paying top dollar for management, for coaches, for players. And for what?

They now have the distinction of owning the only franchise in hockey to miss the playoffs every year since the lockout.

If they ran their businesses with as little accountability as they operate the Leafs, they’d all be out of work.